Antique Ticker Tape Machines | Hacker News Reader

Antique Ticker Tape Machines

justcollecting.com

12 pointspjmlp6 comments

Shame there's not more pics for the article, especially internals, quite interesting machines.

> The Universal Stock Ticker was developed by Thomas Edison in 1869, when he was just 22 years old and working for Gold & Stock Telegraph Company. This design improved on previous stock tickers, allowing for alphanumeric characters and printing one character per second.

Updating the entire S&P500 at best every hour or so. Thankfully they didn't use xml!

I wonder why the mechanism was so interesting/highlighted with a transparent housing (glass dome) for the user to see? You would think it would just be put in a simple opaque box, as the output tape is the only thing of interest. Did it frequently jam and require diagnosis, so a glass dome helped?

Or was the mechanism to be appreciated, like a fine mechanical watch?

I guess it would be for maintenance. Taking of a casing everytime something breaks or required adjustment can become quite a nuisance.

It looks small. How did it print alphabetic characters? Teletypewriters, which can print alpha numeric, are impossibly larger.

This sort of stock ticker uses a small metal wheel that continuously rotates from letter to letter, with an electric mechanism to print the letter that's currently in position. That makes it very slow compared to teletypewriters -- you have to wait for the needed letter to come around, rather than just lifting the correct typebar. Teletypewriters also have mechanisms to move a full-width sheet or roll of paper, which makes them larger than the roller that this ticker has to advance its paper tape.

I've had a hard time finding tickers in pictures or videos, but here's one; skip to nearly the end to see it printing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N_A5hUDtZY

I would love to see the mechanism up close so that I could try and re-make it in cad.

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